The history of the modern U.S. Capitol, the iconic seat of American government, is also the history of America's most tumultuous years. As the majestic new building rose above Washington's skyline, battles over slavery and secession ripped the country apart. Ground was broken just months after Congress adopted the Compromise of 1850. Workers began to bolt the Capitol's nine-million-pound cast-iron dome into place in 1856. The Statue of Freedom was placed atop it in 1863, five months after the Battle of Gettysburg. Little known is the greater irony: America owes the building's scale and magnificence to Jefferson Davis, who remained the Capitol's staunchest advocate up until the week he left Washington to become president of the Confederacy. Davis' protege and the engineer in charge was army captain Montgomery Meigs, who as Lincoln's quartermaster general of the Union Army would never forgive Davis' betrayal of the nation. The Capitol's brilliant architect, and Meigs' longtime rival, was Thomas U. Walter, a Southern sympathizer who would turn fiercely against the South and all who had betrayed the Union.

Developed specifically for the Vietnam War (and made famous by the 2004 presidential campaign), Swift Boats were versatile craft "big enough to outrun anything they couldn't outfight" but too small to handle even a moderate ocean chop, too loud to sneak up on anyone, and too flimsy to withstand the mildest of rocket attacks. This made more difficult an already tough mission: navigating coastal waters for ships and sampans smuggling contraband to the Viet Cong, disrupting enemy supply lines on the rivers and canals of the Mekong Delta, and inserting SEALs behind enemy lines. The stories in this book cover the Swift Boats' early years, which saw search-and-inspect operations in Vietnam's coastal waters, and their later years, when the Swift Boats' mission shifted to the Mekong Delta's labyrinth of 3,000 miles of rivers, streams, and canals. This is an intimate, exciting oral history of Swift Boats at war in Vietnam.